The ROAR Podcast: Ken Belson

# ROAR Podcast: Ken Belson
**Guest:** Ken Belson
**Date:** 2025-10-15
**YouTube URL:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCBcA7xpFmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCBcA7xpFmk)
**Source:** YouTube auto-generated captions (no speaker diarization)

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(0:06) Welcome to the Revenue Above Replacement podcast. I'm your host, Adam Gman. With me today is Ken Bson. Ken, welcome to the podcast. >> Thanks, Adam. Well, >> it's great to have you. It's, you know, this is a little bit different for us in terms of having an author and a writer for. So, before we jump into and, you know, part of the reason we're here is talk about your new book that's coming out soon, but part of the reason, you know, we want to start the podcast the way we start all of our podcast, which tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got to this point in your career to date.

(0:32) >> Sure. I've been a business writer for about 30 years now, almost 30 years. The last 24 of them have been at the New York Times, and I've written business stories overseas. I've written about technology. I've written about banking, cars, you name it. I covered telecommunications and media for quite a while. And also spent time on the metro desk covering the economics of the New York area. And in 2009, I moved to the sports section to take what I hoped was my dream job covering the business of sports. At first, the first four years of doing that, I was kind of a generalist. So I did golf, I did stadiums, I did franchise sales, went to the Super Bowl, went to the World Series, Olympics, a whole bunch of grabag of business stuff, which is actually a great foundation both in terms of source building and also just the leagues operate all differently. USA operates different than the USGA and so forth. That was great. And then in around this time, I want to say around 2010 or 11, I started writing about court cases involving former NFL players who were suing the NFL for fraud and negligence for not telling them about the dangers of concussions and heads.

(1:44) That court case or the accumulation of those court cases were consolidated in federal court. And so I started just covering that. I sort of my observation over the years is that most sports writers don't get into sports to write about court cases. But as I came from the business side, court cases in general are wonderful because you have two sides arguing about something and it's a documentation. So, so in the middle of that in 2013, my editor wrote to me and said, you know, it's it's nice you're doing all this general stuff, but why don't you just do the business of the NFL? And my first thought was, no way. I don't want to do the NFL because I don't want to be at a press box every Sunday in a different stadium, different city. That's not why I got into sports and journalism and business writing. And he said, I don't The next paragraph was, I don't care if you ever attend a game.

(2:33) There's just so much going on with the NFL. It sets the pace and agenda for so many other sports. It is the largest American sport, maybe in the world, too. And it's powerful. I mean, you think about how it it's content on the media on the media side, how powerful it is, stadiums, the power of the Super Bowl, gambling, and of course, the health issues I had been writing about. So, in that context, it made perfect sense to cover the business of the NFL. The third thing he said was, "There's no template. Do whatever you think makes sense." And I have to say, I've never been short of stories. In fact, really, my problem is I have too many stories. the NFL stories that I write, even modest ones, get far more interest than I would on hockey, baseball, basketball, so forth. So, you know, as a journalist, that's that's what you want, right? So, over the years, you know, just in my in my day job, I collected and saw so much on the business front and in 2022 decided to write a book about the business of the NFL. I actually went back to 1993 as the starting point because that's when the NFL and the union reached a huge agreement on revenue sharing which is really the foundation of everything that's come since and of course most fans look at it as the beginning of free agency and the salary cap and all of that is true because the salary cap is is controls the largest expense for the owners but really the revenue sharing is what I focused on and as Gene Upshaw the union chief at the time said this makes us partners. The use of the word partners at the time, 1993, after years of strikes and work stoppages, was kind of a a key word to me that, oh, the union now is not going to be as confrontational. They have a vested interest in the health of the league.

(4:17) The owners have to share 50% of what they make with some exceptions. And that really turned the tide for the NFL. As I say in the introduction of my book, which is coming out in October, you know, under Paul Taglibu, from 1989 to 2006, the revenue of the league doubled. Roger Goodell over the same 17-year period, revenue of the NFL has tripled. So, in my mind, that seemed like a good business story. What I've euphemistically called the the superersizing of the NFL, and that's where I am today. Yeah, I still cover the business of the NFL, although I've spread to other back to other sports again. But yeah, no, that's how I came to the book and and it's it's exciting actually to go back and have be able to tell the story in longer form.

(5:01) >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think you know I often say this a lot in the podcast but it's good to start at the beginning and you mentioned you know obviously the conversations that were happening in 1993 Paul Tagley Bull's Ascent the convers you know obviously the negotiation with Gene Upsaw you mentioned about being partners but maybe before we even get into that you know the book is called you know every day is Sunday can you talk about you know kind of your you you mentioned this a little bit as a reporter but one of the things that's interesting about the book is your unique access to the owners and the decision makers involved. Can you talk about kind of what that process was like and how those conversations went and became kind of the foundation of what the book is? So, one, what is, you know, kind of what I you mentioned a little what more of the some of the themes you tackle and then how the access to those decision makers really drove the book writing process.

(5:43) >> Yeah, it's it's good question. So, the the first thing is the book Every Day is Sunday is is a reported history. So, I went through, you know, my old notebooks. There were so many stories. Any story that I write for the New York Times, I might have say, you know, onetenth of what I actually gathered used in a story. There's so much material. There are many observations, things that never really would make it in a newspaper story. So many things sitting in my notebooks anyway. So, it's reported in the sense that I observed it and wrote about it at that time. And I should say really only for the second half of the book because I was not doing this in the in the '9s when the when the during the Paul Tagubu era. So for that I had to go back and and meet many of the key characters including the former commissioner the people at the league at the time. So some of it is I guess you would think of as history although it's it's sort of recent history and a lot of it is really just stuff I witnessed. So it's it's a combination of both in terms of access. So I've been going to NFL meetings regularly. They're quarterly meetings and sometimes special meetings.

(6:47) I've been going there to them for since 2013 when I started full-time. You know, at first it was pretty nerve-wracking. I didn't even know who most of the owners were. I didn't know who to approach. I didn't know who the team presidents were. I had a couple of ideas. I knew who Bob Craft was. I knew who Jerry Jones was, but I was pretty new. And then I quickly realized the way the way to get to know them is to just keep showing up. And you start to understand the narratives going on. There are issues of the day, whether it's Ray Rice or Colin Kaepernick, whatever. Some of those news stories made it incumbent on me to be there, but many times it was just the owners seeing me frequently. I also made a very conscious decision back in 23 or and excuse me in 2013 when I started covering the league to get to know some of the owners individually and I deliberately did not go to Jerry Jones and Robert Craft initially because I felt like I was going to get to them anyway. They're so wellknown. They're central to every kind of key decision in the NFL that I didn't didn't feel like I had to get to them right away. And what I did was I looked for the next generation of owners. Clark Hunt, Shod Khan, guys in their 50s and 60s, not 70s and 80s, guys who played key roles but maybe were not written about as much.

(8:05) Clark Hunt was intriguing to me because during the labor talks in 2011, he was at the table along with Jerry Jones and Robert Craft, but he was the one designated by Roger Goodell to brief the other owners on what happened that day at the table. And I found that interesting because it meant that he was level-headed, straight, serious, but also very knowledgeable to be able to field questions. And so I ended up writing a profile of Clark in 2013, just at the beginning of the Andy Reid era, and I found him very he he's a quiet man, picks his words carefully, but that investment of time back then has really paid off. I I've I see Clark at every meeting now and he's taken a bigger role in the league and you could argue I've sort of watched him go from a quiet owner to a more prominent one and he's now on the finance committee and was instrumental in the introduction of private equity investment in the NFL. So that was an example. I I I tried to look for other owners that were just a little bit more under the radar. And so when the book came around, you know, it wasn't hard to get they they knew who I was. Now, did they want to talk for a book or for a story? I would argue that they actually were more interested in talking for a book. Often it feels like it's their legacy. It's events that happened 5 10 years ago and so forth.

(9:26) And I spent hours and hours with various owners, probably a dozen altogether. Some owners were never going to be interested. Some turn me down for whatever reasons. Some never speak to the media. Jod Allen in Seattle never speaks almost never speaks to the media. And there were some owners like Greg Penner with the with the Denver Broncos was so new that he wouldn't have had any context for what I was looking for. So when you really sort of break it down, there's about a dozen dozen and a half owners who are who are, you know, covered the span of my book. And you know, to get to say a dozen out of a dozen and a half is is, you know, pretty good. And then of course I spoke to union chiefs and team presidents and people in the media industry and people at the league office and so forth. Yeah, I mean that's very robustly reported and you can see that throughout the book as you read it. You can see all the different sources and all the different perspectives. So again, we're going to get into that more in the conversation, but I do want to start as you mentioned, you decided to start in 1993 with, you know, obviously the the negotiations that happened in 93 and you obviously mentioned the partners. Can you just provide a little more depth about what happened in 1993, why it was so seinal in particular the impact it had on media rights because that is you say the business of the NFL is largely although not obviously exclusively tied to media rights.

(10:41) >> Sure. So it actually goes back to the 1980s. There was a work stoppage strike in a in 1982. It was a a shortened season. My my favorite team, the Miami Dolphins, made it to the Super Bowl on a nineame regular season. Probably shouldn't have otherwise, but anyway, I'll take it. And then there was another more even more contentious strike in 1987. Again, the players walked out. It was really essentially over free agency, but other things including benefits and revenue sharing, but you know, all the other leagues at that point, well, certainly the NBA and Major League Baseball already had free agency. So, the players were NFL players were fighting for the same. They only missed one week of the season in 1987, and it was ugly. They had scab players come out. It it was a bad period. Soon after that, the players went back. Soon after that, they sued the NFL for antitrust, which is a typical, you know, strategy of the union. And that case lasted until 1992. There were several cases, but in short, the one that really mattered landed in Minnesota in front of a district judge called Judge Dodie, a former marine who, from all accounts seem to scare both sets of lawyers. And so he really, as good judges do, tried to broker a settlement. he doesn't want to have to rule on something called preeemption which is whether the players have to go through the CBA to you know to resolve their issues. Now at this time the union had descertified so there really was no CBA operating in in practice. So in the end he ruled in favor of the pl of the plaintiffs meaning the players and and that granted free agency to the first handful of players. Reggie White was the most famous. And then there was two more successive lawsuits that included the first 250 players that were coming up for free agency and then eventually would have been all players. But by that point, the NFL realized we're we're going to lose this. And and one of the things that becomes clear is that a lot of the contentiousness of the 1980s was based on some very hardline owners, generally in smaller markets, generally with smaller payrolls and not as much attendance money and media money. Places like Tampa Bay, Hugh Culver House, Mike Brown in Cincinnati, some of these owners, you know, to them it was we're going to go out of business if we give them free agency. And so one of the things Tagubu told me was when he was elected commissioner in 1989, he told the owners, "The only way I'll do this job is if you give me control over the ownership, not these set of owners and known as the management council." And so he played a very key role in a sort of pragmatist way, a lawyer's way of trying to thread the needle in a way that the owners couldn't because they were invested financially and emotionally. And so Tagle Buu really was kind of critical to breaking the the that ground and and trying to come across the aisle to Gene Opaw, the players chief at the time, and and using Dan Rooney, the owner, former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, as kind of an intermediary. Those three characters were pivotal. They are in the opening scene of the first chapter, and they they were the ones who finally figured out, you know, we're only destroying ourselves. So once they reached that agreement in 1993 and free agency was going to start a year later, finally there was what they called labor peace and labor peace was critical to everything else in business after that.

(14:10) The networks had been pleading poverty until that point. And one of the reasons they were constantly seeking to pay less money for their media rights was there was always this risk of a strike. there was always this risk of missing games which is just terrible if you're in the programming business and your your best product is not available. So finally they have labor peace and now they can turn around to the networks and say okay we're settled don't worry we're not going to miss any games now and so who enters the fray is Rupert Murdoch and Fox and this really is the sort of hockey stick the superersizing starts right around now. Murdoch had tried twice to get media rights. He had a a fledgling network that was down on you know in some cities on channel 56. He had almost no programming. He had In Living Color and he had The Simpsons.

(14:59) That was pretty much it. He had no news. He didn't own most of his stations. They were franchised. There were a handful like New York City and LA. He owned those stations, but he really didn't have a foothold in most markets. So, he knew from having produced or having seen the Premier League in England that if you have exclusive sports content, you'll get people to watch. And that's what he did with Sky Sports in England. And so, he used the same model here. if he could get the NFC package, which included the Cowboys, the 49ers, the New York Giants, some of the biggest markets in the country, you'll get people coming to Fox. They'll be looking for Fox on the dial. And it'll also mean that the affiliates that that carry them will want to have Fox. There'll be there'll be a bidding war to carry the NFC games.

(15:47) And that's exactly what happened. He he bid twice as much as CBS. CBS had had that package for 30 plus years. and he blew them out of the water. He he bid, you know, $400 million a year, which was an extraordinary sum of money at the time. And he wrestled this away from CBS. And wouldn't you know it, all those a the CBS affiliates in Detroit, in San Francisco, they suddenly switched to Fox. And so CBS lost a lot of its footprint and it didn't have that prime time programming. If you'll recall back in the day, you had 7:00 games. games ended at 7 o'clock on Sunday and they rolled right into 60 Minutes and all these other programs and now they had none of that programming promotion and so CBS's ratings tanked. They realized, oh my god, we need to get back into football. It took them four years. So yeah, it was really Rupert Murdoch and from Rupert Mock getting football he then launched his news network and then everything else because now he was on channel 5, Channel 7, Channel 9 and that really changed the face frankly of the American media landscape. So it was labor peace TV and then after that exclusive sponsorship deals, media deals famously Reebok and Nike were two Coke and Pepsi, others AMX and Visa. the NFL realized that instead of spreading it to three or four credit card companies, let's just pick one and have them pay even more for the exclusivity. So, a lot of pieces fell into line once they had that labor piece.

(17:16) >> And this is a good point to enter. You know, so three of the main characters are definitely not the only characters are Jerry Jones, Robert Craft, and Roger Goodell. You start to really show Jerry Jerry Jones impact on the NFL, the media rights negotiation, getting this Fox deal to fruition. Can you talk more about a that in part with Jerry's involvement, but obviously the what happened with Jerry, how he bought the Cowboys and the rise of the Cowboys from there? >> Sure. Jerry's the book is built around Jerry Jones and Robert and and Roger, but of course the three other characters I mentioned preceded them. Jerry came in in 1989. There's some fascinating stuff about him. One is that he actually went to Jimmy Hoffa's pension fund or the pension fund controlled by Jimmy Hoffa, the central states pension fund, seeking money to buy the San Diego Chargers of the old AFL as a 23-year-old, which is just remarkable the sort of the guts of the guy or the naivee, I don't know.

(18:12) Even back in the 1960s, he was literally two years out of college and wanted to own an NFL team. But, you know, he ended up making a fortune in oil and real estate and a bunch of other things. And in 1989, he's on a fishing trip in Mexico with his son Steven, his oldest son, and he sees in the newspaper that the Cowboys are for sale. Now, Jerry is from Arkansas. He had business interests in Oklahoma, but he knew more than anybody that the Cowboys were America's team or self-proclaimed America's team. And so, he immediately got his act together to bid put a bid together. And it was a rollicking bid with all sorts of Jerry-like missteps, including sort of showing up at a restaurant with Jimmy Johnson and their wives and being photographed by the Dallas Morning News when the deal was supposed to be secret.

(18:59) So, um, anyway, it's very Jerry, but he he went heavily into debt to buy the team. And I think that's critical to understand. First of all, the team was one and 15 his first season. They had not made the playoffs in three years prior. So, he he had his back again. He had a lot of work to do and paying off his loans was a motivation to find money in new places and so he fixed up the suites and he had a different kind of sales team. He looked for new sponsorships and he bent the rules as as best he could bend them to find new sources of revenue to pay off his debts.

(19:34) And you know it coincided with bringing in his college buddy Jimmy Johnson and putting together a great team that won three Super Bowls in four seasons. So really everything clicked for Jerry. But Jerry also like Robert Craft understood that having the Cowboys dominate isn't great for the league. And he has said it in different ways over the years. He said, "I need Cincinnati to be good. I I need the smaller markets, Indianapolis to be good because unless we're all good in this revenue sharing model, unless we're all good, it's not going to work."

(20:05) So he's been accused of being selfish and making decisions that benefited the Cowboys first. But he has also been a league first owner and that port that came through in the in the media talks in 1993 that I mentioned with Fox. The committee back then was much smaller. It was Art Modell, the longtime owner of the Cleveland Browns. He had gotten sick. Pat Bolan comes in from the Broncos and Jerry. That was kind of it. There wasn't there wasn't a lot of owner input or at least at the bargaining table. And Jerry understood something that for whatever reason the NFL had never figured out. Now remember now the 1980s had ended 1990s. There's now cable TV. ESPN had some Monday night games but there really was it basically was NBC had the AFC package, CBS had the NFC package. ABC had Monday Night Football.

(20:56) ABC/ ESPN. There was some TBS had some games as well, but basically there were a set number of packages and a set number of networks bidding for them. Jerry said, "Well, why don't we add more bidders? Once we get a extra bidder, we get a bidding war. Once we get a bidding war, we get higher prices and we can use that as leverage." That extra bidder was Fox. And for whatever reason, it was a kind of cozy deal in the past. Art Modell knew CBS, he knew NBC. They just kind of worked out deals. And then the increases in the media packages were in the high single digits, low double digits most years or most cycles.

(21:32) And it was typically three-year deals. Jerry said, "What do we what are we doing here? Why don't we get an extra bidder?" And that paid off. Fox was hungry. Fox needed the the content that nobody else could provide, which is the NFC. And and so he added that fourth bidder. CBS was blown out. Circle back now four years to 1996. CBS had been offering 250 295 eventually for the package they got out bid on. They're now bidding 500 million for the AFC package which was considered a lesser package. So Jerry was right. The everything accelerated after that and the networks realized having seen how poorly CBS did. We need the NFL more than the NFL needs them. And so that just accelerated. The other thing that's worth noting, particularly given your podcast, is that the other leagues took note. NBC, I'm sorry, NBA, MLB, they all realized, wait a second. Yeah. What were we thinking? Why do we have such a nice deal with CBS? Why don't we open it up to NBC? Let's see how many people we can get bidding. So, it really changed the whole business model. And it went from how much money can we make and how much money can we bid and how much can we make back in ads to how much can we afford to lose make it a loss leader to promote other programming and how many Super Bowls can we get out of this and things like that. So it it really was a transformative decision by the NFL and every other league took note of it.

(23:00) >> Yeah. I I want to get into Robert Craft from here again, obviously, as one of the three main characters, but I be remiss not to talk about one of my favorite stories in the book is like how basically unprepared Fox was once they received the rights and how people, you know, the maybe you should I'll let you talk about it, but it was just funny to say like you spent all this money, but it wasn't like, okay, we're ready to go, we're ready to broadcast. It was a pretty whirlwind effort to get that. So, I if you could talk more about that, that'd be great.

(23:23) >> Sure. Sure. There's there's some great characters here, and Rupert being one of them. I mean, he's an Australian, but he he understood from England and being in the news business how important this was. But remember, Fox didn't not only didn't have a news division, it didn't have any sports, it didn't have any cameramen, it didn't have any producers, it didn't have any trucks, it had nothing. So he brought in David Hill who was producing the Premier League games in in England at the time and he flew him to Dallas where the owners were this was before the bidding was settled and he had him do a presentation to the NFL owners. What would you change? What would you make different? And you know one of the things was have the score bug up on the screen. In the old days you would not put the scores of other games on because you didn't want people changing the channel. And so he said, "No, you keep the score up there the whole time. Like what's the big deal?

(24:14) You could have it scroll through. Football fans are football fans. They care about other games, even the ones they can't watch." That was one, the first down marker, obviously. So he he sort of wowed them with this. And that actually influenced the owners quite a bit. They were nervous. They actually debated taking out insurance in case Fox fell through. But David Hill goes back to London and around Christmas he gets a call saying, "Have you seen the Wall Street Journal?" And you know, David says, "No, I'm in London. Why would I see the Wall Street Journal?" And he said, "The first paragraph says Fox has won the rights to the NFC package.

(24:49) Second paragraph, David Hill's in charge." Rubert Murdoch never bothered to really call him. So he he ends up flying to LA. So where do you find cameramen? Where do you find producers? all this CBS they're, you know, by the time the playoffs end, they're a lot of people are going to be out of work. So, he hired Ed Goran, who was one of their lead NFL producers. And Ed's rolodex was critical. He brought in a lot of people, including a lot of young talent that we now think of as, you know, standard issue. Joe Buck, Kevin Harland, a lot of these announcers started, Kenny Albert, a lot of these announcers started at Fox as young kids. Interestingly, almost all of them were sons of existing announcers, Tom Brenamman and so forth. Other other guys, you know, Kenny Albert and Marv Albert, Joe Buck and his dad. So, yeah, it was interesting how they built that together. There's a great scene in there. He also decides he's got to get Madden. And he brings Madden over from CBS with Pat Summerl. And John John Madden is calling Rupert saying, "Did we get the San Francisco Dallas game, which is the the big going to be the big game of the regular season, a rematch of the previous year's NFL NFC Championship game?" And so he Rupert says, "Yes, yes, we'll get it." He calls back again. It calls to Ed Goran. Ed Goran says, "We're going to get it. We're going to get it."

(26:10) the third time, John Madden says, "I've heard that the other network's going to get it that AB that ABC is going to get it and it's gonna be a Monday night game and and now it's freakout time." So Ed Goran calls Rupert and says, "You got to call Tagu and and make sure that we get this game. It's an NFC game. It shouldn't go to another carrier." And so he calls and Tagu says, "Well, what games do you want?" And he says, "Hold on, hold on. I I can't find the damn list." So he Paul Taglubu sort of laughed in retrospect because he kept calling them matches not games and eventually he spits out San Francisco 49ers against Dallas Cowboys and Tagoo says yeah yeah we'll take care of it don't worry don't worry so so really they were rubs they not rubs they were starting from zero but they got the theme song together they hired Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long in the booth Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Johnson you know and they but they they hit the ground running as it were in six, seven months. It's pretty remarkable story.

(27:10) >> Yeah, it's a very remarkable story and it's definitely there's, you know, you've given a lot of color. There's a lot more color in the book, too, about exactly what happened, how it came together. And I I think you may be underselling just how like that story about David Hill and how it coming over. So, you definitely should read the book for the more details on that story. But want to go on to Robert Craft again, one of those the second and the main characters in the book. You know, he and Jerry have some similarities. They're also have a lot of differences and both in terms of how they acquired the team, their personalities, how they operate.

(27:39) So, you know, starting from, you know, Robert Craft kind of came similar from Jerry was not necessarily well known in NFL circles and now is probably one of, if not between him and Jerry are probably the two most famous owners in the NFL. So, talk about a little bit of his story, kind of his rise to power, particularly in the initial in the 90s when he first owned the team. >> Sure. Yeah. Robert and Jerry said actually have a lot of similarities. Something I didn't quite appreciate until I started doing a lot of research. They both had dads who were entrepreneurs, small businessmen. They both came from pretty modest means.

(28:11) Robert's family, rented apartments for years, you know, so they and they were both very wedded to the places they grew up, Little Rock and and Boston. And they were both eager entrepreneurs themselves. Robert, a couple years into out of college, gets an MBA and he works at his father-in-law's company and and organizes a management buyout of his father-in-law's company, which takes a certain amount of gumption, but it also shows you where his mind was back in the 60s even. And he was in the packaging business, which gave him a window into the world, right? I mean, trade was booming globally. Uh, packaging, meaning cardboard boxes and the like, was critical to a lot of that.

(28:51) And so he had kind of an interesting and international worldview. He was also part owner of the CBS affiliate in Boston which gave him an insight into how the media worked. He was giving a lot of money away at that point as a philanthropist even then. And he was interested in sports. He was he played a little bit of football in college but got injured and and that was sort of the beginning and end of it. But he was he was the owner of something called the Boston Lobsters of the old World Tennis League and which was a bit of a short-lived enterprise. And one of the things he learned then was that he had the team but he did not control the venue and he didn't get any money from parking. He didn't get any money from food and beverage and that ultimately doomed the team and it it collapsed. But he learned from that and in the 90s the Boston Patriots or New England Patriots were really one of the worst teams in the league financially and there was an opportunity for him to buy the parking lots around the stadium and he realized well at the very least I'll make parking revenue from all these fans. That was his first gambit. The second is when Victor Cayenne bought the team the stadium was up for sale and he outbid him by $8 million and got the stadium.

(30:05) So he worked from the outside in. He got all the parking revenue then he got all the food and beverage and he really had Cayam and a noose because you know the only thing Cayam had left was ticket sales and media revenue. So two two you know big sources of revenue were out of his reach and ultimately Cayam owned the team for four years. It did extremely poorly during that time and he sold to a guy named James Orwine who was one of his creditors. He basically sold the team to get out of debt. And Orwine wanted to move the team to St. Louis. St. Louis had lost its team. The Cardinals had moved to Arizona already and they had a new stadium and he wanted the Patriots to be that team. But the lease said the team had to stay through 2001. It had to be the main tenant. So he couldn't get out until 2001. And if he tried, he would have faced Craft in court and that would have been ugly. And he realized ultimately I got to get out as well. So he had tried to sell to other St. Louis investors but Craft outbid him. Like Jerry, he paid a record price in his case 172 million was over 20 million more than he his highest number. But he realized he had all the other assets. He just needed the team.

(31:19) And that was kind of a interesting business strategy is to buy everything around the team and then ultimately own the team itself. And Jerry by the way did something similar in that the state he also bought the stadium along with the team. Not every team did that. Back in that day, even in the 80s into the 90s, many stadiums were still publicly built and owned. The Vet Three Rivers Stadium, these were still municipal stadiums, but in both cases, they were privately owned. And that was a key to Robert's doing that. And like Jerry, he quickly started getting involved in league business. You know, obviously he was trying to rebuild the Patriots. He had Bill Parcels. They went to the Super Bowl fairly quickly after he took over, but you know, he got involved in the media committee. He tried to get it. He got on the finance committee and so forth. So, he knew I I'm not just going to be a owner focused on my team. I'm going to be focused on the health of the league.

(32:14) >> Yeah. And can you one of the things I do want to talk about, you mentioned stadiums. I want to come back to that in a second, but just, you know, setting the stage for, you know, the interactions with Roger. And what I thought was interesting also was one there's a story about the lobsters that's interesting about one of the owners complimenting Robert about his naming of the lobsters and being the profess but professional name or team or best name in professional sports. But I think this is a good just before we get into Roger is the actual interaction between the owners and like some of the relationships and the personal relationships because Jerry and you know Jerry Robert they all took some took different paths and had different perspectives but you know can you that's part of what's interesting part of your book is this is the league as itself they have a partnership with the players but obviously the owners have a different partnership and there's different dynamics and different politics. Can you talk a little bit more particularly as Jerry and Robert came up like what what were those dynamics? What did that look like? What What was the league dealing with prior to kind of Roger coming into power after Paul retired?

(33:14) >> Yeah, it's a good question because because some of it actually has to do with the valuation of the teams and the valuation of those teams is based on the media as 50% of the revenue of the league. And so increasingly these teams get more and more expensive. By today's standards, $172 million seems like a bargain. The commander sold for6 billion. So you know the valuations I think the Eagles were were over eight eight almost nine million billion when you you know for the valuation of the team for their e private equity sale but in any event yeah so you know the league had still has multigenerational owners the Mars and the Rooneyies are probably the most famous but you got the bidwills you got the Browns the Mike Brown taking over for Paul Brown and his daughter after him so so these owners look they bought their teams for almost nothing $25,000 some of the original AFL owners Ralph Wilson. So everything after that to them was gravy and they were not in a rush. They weren't they didn't need to pay off debts because the team was was already paid off decades earlier. So so there was a different mindset and I guess I would call them sort of stewards of the league but you could also call them sort of you know conservative conservative business-wise. There was no need to take a ton of risk because you know why? We were getting our dividend checks. We love going to the games on Sundays. You know, we didn't need to be popular. We didn't get into it for that.

(34:39) These were people who were, I guess, in the old world to be called sportsmen. You know, they they had the money and most of their money was tied up in the teams, but they didn't have extravagant lifestyles. By the 80s, you start to have a different set of owners come in. Guys are a little looser. Leonard Toast from the Philadelphia Eagles was well known. Joe Robbie was a hustler, Wheeler dealer. always seemed to be pay paycheck to paycheck, but they were entrepreneurial and they needed money and they were hungrier for it. And so they they tried to move the league in that direction. And then you had owners given the economics of the league like Hugh Cberhouse and they were just losing money. And Hugh Culverhouse was an interesting story, the owner, the original owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he was a tax attorney to some of the owners. So he was helping them figure out how to, you know, pay less taxes. and he ended up buying a team himself in the 70s. But it was a it was a creaky old model. The stadiums weren't what they are now. They didn't have suites or if they did it was limited. The the incentives for them to invest were different. In later subsequent CBAs and labor agreements into the '9s, suddenly the the owners said, "Well, maybe we can carve out money from these luxury boxes and we don't share that with the players."

(35:56) Well, suddenly, hey, we need to add more luxury boxes. So the stadiums got fancier and you know the general seating the general tickets that were you would see say at municipal stadium in Cleveland it didn't make as much money and you had to share that money with the players so and the visiting team. So the you know there were a lot of structural issues that benefited the younger owners. Jerry and Robert, as I said, you know, came in, you know, at the beginning of this TV money and they understood this. So, they saw I think both of them too still see the or see the NFL as much as an entertainment product, not just a sport. And that was kind of a key mindset shift that owners that came in in the 90s, Wayne Heisenga was another, came in and and realized, oh, this is an this is a media asset.

(36:44) There's a reason why Fox paid all this money. It's not just because they love football and sports is popular. It it is the anchor to everything else they do. And so I think that's kind of a key mindset in the 90s. Pat Bolan also was one of those who realized that this is more than just a game. John Mar is famous for saying the owner of the Giants is famous for saying that his dad Wellington to him football should be played at one o'clock on Sunday. He hated Monday night football. He didn't want to play God forbid on Sunday nights. He wanted to go to mass with the family, go straight to the stadium, watch the game, and then go home for dinner. Like, that was his mindset. And it was quaint in the 1930s and 40s and 50s. It worked. But not by the 70s when you have Monday Night Football and then you add all these prime time games. No, it doesn't work anymore. And why do you add prime time games? Cuz that's when the most viewers are. So, it's interesting how some of those owners still kind of get dragged into the future. But Jerry and Robert should take a lion share of credit for that amongst the owners.

(37:46) >> And again, there's a lot more in the book about the generational change, the difference between generational owners and these new entrepreneurs. The new, you know, at the time now Jerry and Robert are obviously more of the elder statesmen, but at the time were younger owners as you mentioned about, you know, the dead and they're pushing the business model. So definitely check that out in the book. But I do want to transfer over to Roger Goodell. you know, particularly the two things that he was known for particularly at the beginning was a that he knew everybody.

(38:11) He was a life, you know, he even wrote at when he was a kid that his lifelong goal was to be the commissioner of the NFL, but also that he set this ambitious $25 billion revenue target when he basically when he first took over. So, you know, I think it's a good springboard now that we've little learned a little bit more about Roger and Jerry to move sorry, Robert and Jerry to move to Roger and his story and how he came to be the commissioner and why he decided to set that ambition. what was at the time an ambitious goal in terms of tripling the NFL revenue.

(38:38) >> Sure. Roger's an interesting study. I mean, he he joined the league pretty soon after college. As you said, he wrote a letter to his dad when he was doing his job search out of college saying he he wanted one day to be the commissioner of the NFL. That's a pretty narrow job search and a long path to getting there, but to his credit, he he did get there. He started out, you know, clipping newspapers and doing odd jobs in the NFL. He there there's a bit of an origin myth that he he sent 50 plus letters to owners in the league asking for any job and Don Weiss who was one of the executive vice presidents back in the early 80s recogni saw Roger's letter and invited him in. Roger's father was a former US senator. Something tells me that Don Weiss recognized that last name especially since you know his father Roger Goodell's father was from New York State. So, it would not it would not surprise me that Don Weiss just sort of put two and two together, said, "hm, senator's son. Maybe we should bring him in." But to his credit, Roger worked hard and he took on any task they would send him. And, you know, Paul Tagibu, I think, really was his greatest champion.

(39:46) But, but Roger did a whole bunch of things. One thing he did during a Super Bowl in New Orleans in the 1980s was Pete Rosel needed a driver. He used to go from cocktail party to cocktail party and you get the kid to drive the car. this was a simpler time. You didn't need a bodyguard and and an an SUV or anything. So, Roger basically sat outside at the car, make sure it was double parked and didn't get a ticket. So, you know, he he was running around. It was a much smaller league then. It maybe had 100 employees. So, it was easier to get to know people. But when Tagibu comes in, he sees an eager, omnivorous mind and and immediately starts giving him bigger tasks to solve the Pro Bowl, working on marketing issues with Jerry Jones. Jerry Jones was fighting with the league about signing his own sponsors that competed with the league sponsors and Roger was brought in then at NFL properties. So he also NFL's expansion into Europe, Roger played a role there, too. Some people that I spoke to for the book felt like Roger was stepping over them. Others who were above Roger felt like Roger was ambitious and what's wrong with having a ambitious young employee trying to do as best he can and working, you know, very long hours. There's a little scene in the book where they're trying to solve this, you know, the the Browns have Art Modell, the owner of the Browns, has decided to move to Baltimore and the city of Cleveland is is going to sue the NFL. So, it it led to a lot of back and forth with the league. And Frank Hawkins, one of the league's lawyers who had been working with Roger on a lot of relocation, you know, dramas, said that he left the Super Bowl in 1996, which had been in Arizona, and he flew home, got out his his cold weather clothing, and got back on a plane and went to Cleveland. Roger went from Arizona to Honolulu, where the the Pro Bowl was, and then flew to Cleveland. So, he was still wearing Arizona Honolulu stuff in Cleveland in February. So, you know, he was a man on the move. And I think it it became apparent by the early 2000s that he was the successor to Tagu. Neil Austrian, who was the the president, the business president of the league, had left. Tagu did not replace him. Roger didn't change his title. He was sort of the chief operating officer for all intents and purposes, but there was really nobody else in his way. And by the time 2006 comes around and Tag Blue steps down, it's pretty clear that Roger has the sort of the best well-rounded resume. He was relatively young, too. He was in his 40s at the time. But, you know, to his credit, he helped the owners solve problems. Stadiums for instance, relocating. He had worked with these owners on various problems over the years. So, he had goodwill built up and he had operational knowledge. And so when the votes came together, Roger was was ultimately chosen.

(42:41) >> And then I think there's a few more questions we want to get to. Again, we're not going to be able to cover everything that's in the book because it's a very expensive book and obviously want people to read it. But I think one of the seminal moments that you talk about the book, you know, we started with the 1993 negotiations. The first negotiations with Roger Goodell, Demorris Smith, Robert Craft, Jerry Jones, they all played a pivotal role and that set the stage kind of for the next phase of the NFL's growth. And you know it's definitely a controversial kind of process and there's a lot of moving pieces. So I think it' be helpful kind of particularly as we're setting up the you know the latter half of the book you know what happened in that negotiation why was it pivotal and you know what are some of the kind of repercussions or reverberations from that negotiation. So yeah, so 93 as we said earlier was very much Gene Upshaw, Paul Tagaboo, Dan Rooney and a handful of other owners obviously and then the successive deals were were hammered out pretty easily between Tagu and Upshaw.

(43:38) There wasn't there wasn't the same burning urgency that there had been coming out of strikes and lawsuits and things like that. And the last deal they cut was in 2006. Tagibly Buu was about to retire or wanted to retire. He retired soon after that and Upshaw as it turned out died a couple years later. So it was their last deal that they put together and it was essentially presented to the owners as a bit of an ultimatum. This is the deal we've kind of cobbled together. It was not done in the sort of expansive way that subsequent deals have been done. And I think a lot of the owners felt blindsided that the players were going to get 53% of revenue before exemptions.

(44:19) And that seemed like, wait a second, we're beyond 50/50 at this point. Why are they getting more than 50? And there was a a lot of bad taste in some owners mouths. And some of them immediately from the time they said yes realized we're going to have to claw this money back. So So the seeds were set for the next showdown. 2010 the owners opt out of the CBA and they don't reach a deal by March of 2011 and so they lock out the players. This is also because Geneobshaw died the first CBA not just for Roger but for Demorris Smith the new president or executive director of the players association. So you have two new guys trying to establish their turf, their bonafides, you know, with their constituency, the players and the owners. Roger of course is better equipped, right? Because he's been there the whole time. He knows his guys, his owners. He knows their problems, what their priorities are. Demorris had to get to know the players first. He got hired in 2003, 2009. And already he has to say, "I'm the new guy. Oh, by the way, we need to start putting together a fund in case we go into a strike or a walk out. So, he's already sort of a wartime general before he's even known who his troops are." And that that was a tough hill to climb very quickly. and and it ramped up very quickly. Now, he was a litigator, so he came in, you know, he knew how to sort of try and rally the troops, but it wasn't obvious that the players were willing to go on strike, and ultimately they didn't. I think the money had gotten so big now, the players were so reluctant to go on strike because missing even one week was a lot of money. In the old days when players even back into the 80s when players were making $25,000 a year, you could make that up selling insurance in the offseason, but you know when the numbers get when minimum salaries are six figures plus, you know, a paycheck's a big a big loss. So they ended up getting locked out. Demorris Smith had the strategy that they used earlier in descertifying the union. It led to several court. It was a was a court case that was in favor of the players initially and then went to appeal and the owners lost. Excuse me, the owners won and that ultimately led to the settlement. It was an interesting settlement in 2011. The numbers were so much bigger, but one of the key features was the league and the owners agreed to a 10-year labor deal. It had previously been three, four, five years. labor theory is you don't want to do a a big labor a long labor deal because you just don't know where the economy is going to go. But the owners in particularly Robert Graph felt like, hey, we don't want to keep going through this every 5 years. And by the way, if we get a 10-year labor deal, talk about labor piece, I can go back to Fox and CBS and ask for a 10-year media deal. Think about the the increase in in costs or revenue over that period. So, it it it won the day. And I think that that the 10-year labor deal, the length of the deal doesn't get reported enough, but it it it rest it probably was not in the union's best interest initially. I think ultimately is probably better for the health of the league, but you know, I think in the end, they've done it a second time starting in 2020. And I think that's going to be the new model.

(47:34) And again, the other leagues have now followed and tried to do longer labor deals as well. There were other features including player safety, which was important to the players. Remember this is during the concussion crisis. They also got more money for retired player pension plans and other benefits. So the players saw that as paramount and the money less paramount. It's not that they didn't care about the money, but the money was so big already and the players were almost all millionaires. So at some point the fight was less over the total amount of money and more over what else can we get and player safety and player health and welfare was important.

(48:13) >> Yeah. Yeah, and you cover a lot of the nuance on both sides, both from the owner side and the player side and some of the things that were and still are potentially controversial and again good to see in the book and I'd recommend reading that in the book. But in this negotiate, I did want to talk about Robert Craft and Jerry Jones role, particularly Robert Craft's role given the situation he was in. It's very rare to see owners and players hugging each other after a very difficult negotiation and that's did happen with Robert Craft and the head of the union at the time from the players perspective. So you talk a little bit more about their role in in the negotiation, that would be great.

(48:43) >> Yeah, it was an interesting character study. If you look at the owners on the bargaining committee, I mentioned Clark Hunt being kind of the straight laced accountant MBA type, no drama, no yelling. John Mara who actually started his professional career as a labor lawyer working for labor unions until he came into the family business known as the New York Giants was also there played key role was you know sort of had a high level of trust with the players again one of those multigenerational owners that wasn't in it for the money or wasn't perceived to be in it for the money that was an interesting position for him to play Jerry Richardson was really one of the hardliners which I find fascinating because Jerry Richardson was former player who actually left the NFL over a $500 contract dispute. And you would think that he would have more sympathy with the players, but in fact, it was the reverse. He was the hardest hardliner on that committee. And then you had Jerry Jones who played kind of an interesting icebreaker. Jerry, the players told me that Jerry would tell good jokes, get everybody loose. You know, he knew he had a sense of the moment and he had a funny way of telling stories. you know, he could break the ice in a way that the other owners couldn't. And in a way, Jerry's very unvarnished. And I think that's put people at ease even though he was trying to pick your pocket at the same time. And then there was Robert Craft. And and I think it's worth he rightly I think gets a lot of credit for how this ultimately was solved. But his wife was dying during this process and he really didn't have a lot of patience for the histrionics of the lawyers on both sides. the grandstanding. His wife is dying of cancer back in Boston. It just felt meaningless. And so he would take frequently fly home to Boston to be with his wife. And he was expressing a frustration. And so he suggested uh and I'm sure it was seconded. Let's get rid of the lawyers. Let's just have Morris and Roger, you know, Robert Craft, maybe one other owner, and Jeff Saturday, who was one of the key players, Kevin Malai, Dominique Foxworth. let's just have let's just talk sense here. Let's get rid of the the other distractions. And that really was a smart move because it it it got everybody to it lowered the temperature. And I think the players, they're all on record saying this. Most of them are. They were very impressed with Robert that he was taking time away from his his sick wife to do this. And they realized, you know what, let's let's turn this down and really start to look for solutions. And ultimately the final solutions were precipitated by this appeals court decision that went in the NFL's favor. So the players knew they had a limited window or limited amount of leverage left. And so the the defining image of that CBA was a few days after Robert's wife died. He's sitting Shiva in Boston and they're supposed to be in Washington to sign the CBA to approve the final CBA and he doesn't know whether he wants to go and his family basically says you know your wife would want you to be there. you worked so hard on this and it was for a greater cause. And so he shows up and he makes a short speech and he actually hugs Jeff Saturday in front of the cameras and that is a defining moment of the sort of amity between the players and the owners. They certainly have their issues but at that brief moment they saw you know a common cause and that kind of change you know as I look back to 1993 and the period before the start of the book it's just such a sea change now players of course they want their money and they certainly you know are in some cases jealous and angry at owners but at the end of the day they're working for a big organization a$2 billion business and they're paid pretty darn well if you look at the growth of the salary cap it's grown exponentially since it was introduced in 1994.

(52:34) >> Yeah. And what one last again there's so much more in the book that we won't have time to cover and again I highly recommend reading it but one of the last the things I want to talk about were the venues themselves and the impact that had on relocation. That's originally how you and I got connected. you were writing a story on mixeduse developments and the impact on sports and particularly venue anchored or you know stadium anchored or you know some kind of sports venue anchored mixeduse development that's played a pivotal role in the NFL's growth and the development and and a pivotal role in the character the three main characters in the book in addition to many of the other owners can you talk about you know kind of the evolution I the evolution of venues the evolution of where they are and kind of where you're seeing that going particularly as in the future as potentially a revenue and growth source of or a source of growth growth for the NFL.

(53:18) >> Yeah. So, after spending 45 minutes to an hour with you talking about how great the NFL revenue sharing model is, it it's worth bearing in mind that the owners always look for ways around it and or or exemptions to it. And one of them, as I mentioned, was the luxury boxes that are now at every stadium because that's money the owners keep. They don't have to share it with the other owners. They don't have to share it with the players. And every owner can do it. So now you get more and more extravagant stadiums as you helped me understand. Another source of revenue is monetizing the brand of the team in the real estate business. You know, Jerry Jones figured this out. I'm going to build I'm not just going to build a practice facility with the headquarters next to it. I'm going to build an entire community around it called the Star. The Star being the logo of the Cowboys. And it's going to be entirely branded Cowboys. You go down Lombardi Boulevard and Championship Way and there's this, you know, nice restaurants and everything. It's a beautiful community right next to the Star. And then beyond it are homes with other Cowboys themed streets and so forth because his idea is people want to be around that. They love football down in Texas and it's a it's a status symbol basically. But many owners have have seen this and run with it. I wrote about the project in in Atlanta, Centennial Yards, a roughly5 billion dollar project built up between the Atlanta Hawks Arena, the Atlanta Falcon Stadium and this giant hole in the ground above a commercial rail yards in central Atlanta. And that's just one of dozens of projects around the country in all the leagues. All the leagues have seen, all the major leagues have seen the value of their franchises and what they say to the community and why wouldn't you want to put some of that money to work and wouldn't you know it, you don't have to share it with the other owners. So, you know, it's it's brought in new sets of investors, private equity investors. Sixth Avenue Partners out in California uh made a sizable investment in the San Francisco Giants baseball franchise. And I remember talking to one of the principles and I said, "But you know, they got problems. They don't have a salary cap. Their media is kind of fractured." He says, "Yeah, but that'll get settled. And by the way, they have this beautiful neighborhood they're building right across McCovy Cove in San Francisco, and that's part of their portfolio, too." So, in a weird way, investing in an NFL team is now a real estate play.

(55:51) >> Yeah. And I think that's something again we it's going to be an interesting part. You talk about some of the franchise relocation, some of the issue, you know, or challenges that happen there. Again, the importance of venue construction, the idea that everybody's a partner in new venues in the NFL, which I think is really important to to, you know, like you said, you're excluding the luxury box, but the ticket sales, there's a lot of revenues that are shared between the teams. So, everybody is actually involved in a stadium construction because all the owners participate in the revenue. I think the idea of what that means, what that entails, the challenges and opportunities really that that provides is really interesting and something to check out in the book. So, like I said, we've tried to cover many of the key elements in the book. Again, I would definitely recommend you reading it, but we wanted to close the podcast with a question we ask all of our guests, which we do have a lot of students given this is a Northwestern podcast. We have a lot of students in our program and outside of our program are interested in entering the sports industry is you're obviously in the intersection of business, sports, media.

(56:45) So from your perspective, if students are interested in those topics or interested in creating content, what would you recommend to students who are trying to get involved in those spaces or trying to build a career in media or content? >> Well, I the thing I often tell people is sports teams and frankly sports networks aren't interested in hiring fans. They got plenty of fans. They, you know, Cowboys have 100 million fans. They they don't need to hire you because you like the Cowboys. they need to hire you because you have a skill set that they need. Whether that's selling tickets, you know, using AI to determine ticket season packages, selling merchandise, food and beverage, event day stuff. And in my case, in the case of the media, being able to write basically and report, it sounds simplistic, but it's actually important. And it's not something you learn overnight. You don't just wake up and learn how to write for breaking news or feature stories. And reporting is a interesting and difficult sometimes difficult thing. I write on a subset of sports. I write about I'm dealing more with owners and union people and and corporations than I am players and and the like coaches. I almost never go to the locker room anymore. I used to go occasionally and I'm a fish out of water, you know, because I there are player there are excuse me, there are reporters there that are doing things I don't feel comfortable doing. like I don't get to know the running backs or the tight end coaches. I don't have the vocabulary for it. Sure, I could fake it, but it's not where I make my money. So, I've just, you know, tried to learn as much as I can about different businesses. You and I met on a story about commercial real estate, a topic I don't write a ton about, but I have a kind of omnivorous appetite for uh topics. And you know, look, the NFL is an entertainment business, okay? It is a sport. that's their primary product. But I don't need to know X's and O's to know what makes the NFL run as a business. I need to learn about how media works. I need to know how sponsorship works, food and beverage, what's the markup on a beer, stadiums, how they're put together, municipal financing, the like. Those are the things I've tried to learn over many years, writing a variety of stories. And and by the way, not just in football, because every sport has a little bit of a different model. So yeah, that's that's the thing is is be omnivorous.

(59:08) Just look for every avenue or way to look at a team because the team is is a you know is a business. You know, as much as we like to think it's a game, it's it's a business. >> Yeah, I think that's a good place to end. The book is called Everyday is Sunday. It actually talks like it's talks about a lot of the themes you just mentioned in terms of building relationships and you know showcasing the the the ability to talk to different people, have different perspectives, integrate different perspectives. It also highlights the importance of long form content, something I've talked a lot about in my articles and podcasts with previous guests. So Ken, thank you very much for sharing. Again, we highly recommend everybody read the book.

(59:44) There's so many more anecdotes and so many much so much more detail that would be interesting to the readers. So looking forward to everybody getting the book. So Ken, thanks for being on. >> Thanks, Adam. It was enjoyable.